Heron observability with Graphite

To observe Heron’s runtime metrics, you can integrate Heron and the Heron UI with
Graphite and
Grafana.

To accomplish this, you need to do the following:

Export topology metrics from Heron

Gather Aurora and Linux metrics with Diamond

Set up a scripted dashboard with Grafana

Configure the Heron UI to link to Grafana

Exporting Topology Metrics From Heron

Heron supports custom metric exporters from the Metrics Manager. You can either build your own Graphite metrics sink or use the provided Graphite sink.

Gathering Metrics From Aurora

In addition to the topology-specific data available from Heron, much more data is available directly
from Aurora and the Linux kernel. These can help identify many operational problems, such as
CPU throttling or crashes.

A common way to collect data from these sources is via a system metrics collection daemon such as
collectd or Diamond

Creating A Scripted Grafana Dashboard

A convienent way to view topology-specific metrics in Graphite is to create a
scripted dashboard in Grafana. The scripted
dashboard should accept information such as the topology name as query arguments, which will allow
the Heron UI to deep link to a specific topology’s dashboard.

Configuring The Heron UI Link To Grafana

Finally, you can configure the Heron UI to deep link to scripted dashboards by specifying an
observability URL format
(viz.url.format) in the Heron Tracker’s configuration. This will add topology-specific buttons to
the Heron UI enabling you to drill-down into your Grafana dashboards.